Google AdWords for Newbies: What It Is and How to Use It

Google AdWords can be a good source of relevant visitors and potential customers to your website. It’s perfectly suited for small firms as well as for middle and large scale business, local companies and family businesses as well as international corporations. If you are eager to know what is AdWords, this article will provide a brief overview of all its main benefits.

So, what is Google AdWords? It is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program. Its main benefit is that you get targeted visitors to your website on a pay-per-click basis. It means that you pay only for users that clicked on your ad and went to your website - no matter how many impressions your ad has (how many times it was shown to people).

Another benefit of AdWords is that it gives you a lot of flexibility with your campaigns. You can set your own monthly/weekly/daily ad budget. It is possible to limit your ads displays to some geographic region or specific time of the day; you can change your campaigns, keywords, ad texts and settings, stop current campaigns or create new campaigns at any time.

With Google AdWords, you can promote your products or services on Google.com’s search results pages in the “Sponsored Links” section (called search advertising) or on websites that have partnered with Google and accept banners or text ads (called Google Display Network). If you do not know how to use Google AdWords – Google has a very comprehensive and convenient online tutorial, and besides that, you can find a lot of information on AdWords in the Internet.

Search advertising supports only text ads – short texts with a headline (up to 25 characters), two additional descriptive lines (up to 35 characters per line) and a URL to the website or specific page. You select the keywords you want your ads to be displayed for and set a maximum cost per click (maximum amount you are ready to pay for a click). This means that you bid on those keywords but it doesn’t mean that each time you will pay the maximum bid. With every search, Google runs an auction and determines what ads should be shown and at which positions.

The ads are displayed at the top, at the bottom or to the right of the organic search results page on page 1 of the Google search results page. The more you bid for a phrase, the higher it will appear on the page. But bid amount is just one of the parameters that are important to Google. Generally speaking, Google prefers to display the ads that can bring the most revenue to advertisers. In other words, if your ad generates twice as many clicks as your competitor’s ad, you will pay half as much as your competitor for a click. Therefore, it is very important to have quality text ads and a high CTR (click-through rate, or, in other words, the ratio between the amount of impressions and the amount of clicks).

Another option is to get your text or banner ads displayed on the Google Display Network. The ads will be shown on partner websites – forums, commercial sites, information portals, blogs, etc. that relate to your business. While search advertising brings you a targeted audience that is actively seeking your product or service, GDN advertising is displayed to an audience that has no intent to buy immediately. Therefore, search advertising has good potential for immediate sales, and GDN can serve more to improve your brand recognition and simultaneously bring you some sales.

It is easy to set up a Google AdWords account, but in order to be really profitable and successful there, you need to invest some time into learning this system. Therefore, you could consider outsourcing your AdWords account management to a PPC company. This option has its benefits. Google AdWords is quite the complicated system; it is constantly evolving and becomes even more feature-rich over time. So, you need to invest at least several hours per week to track all new trends as well as manage your current campaigns.